Fourth Step on the stony way to an EC Development Education Project

Information provided by Petra Kreinecker, TRIALOG Capacity Building Officer

For more context and information on the five steps towards 10m EUR for Development Education (DE) in the New EU Member States (NMS) please refer to: http://trialog-information-service.blogspot.com/2007/03/five-steps-towards-10m-for-development.html

As TRIALOG reported earlier, at least 47 concept notes with active participation of NMS NGOs have been submitted to the EC within the 1st stage of the 2006 Call for Proposals in Development Education published in 2006. In the middle of May, the EC took the decision on the 1st stage and invited the pre-selected projects to present their full application form to the EC until the 26th of June 2007.

During this 2nd stage of the Call – which is at the same time the fourth step of NMS NGOs on the way to an EC funded DE project - TRIALOG got notice from 34 pre-selected projects with NMS-participation: 17 of them have lead agencies in Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland and Slovenia. 88 NGOs from all NMS (except Latvia) as well as Romania and Bulgaria are consortium members, European partners or associates. The big majority of the submitted projects were elaborated by teams from old (OMS) and new member states. It seems that only three sole NMS-consortia proposals were pre-selected. The OMS-NMS consortia were built with NGOs from 11 different OMS, but especially together with German, Italian, British, Austrian and Dutch NGOs.

In early June, TRIALOG has offered four trainings for the project teams (in Ljubljana, Prague, Warsaw and Bratislava) which helped to clarify the last formal questions about the guidelines, the full application, the logical framework and the budget. 48 participants from old and new member states and one local partner from Georgia worked together on their joint project proposals. The process was facilitated by a trainer.

Unfortunately there is no official information from the EC on the number of pre-selected projects with new member state participation. But what has become known is that 158 proposals from OMS and 44 from NMS passed into the second stage of the Call for Proposal and out of them around 60-70 will receive funding. The final decisions on the submitted full applications are expected for September 2007.

For TRIALOG data (incl. representation/country of pre-selected projects) which is based on information provided by numerous project teams, please turn to: http://www.trialog.or.at/docs/invitation_fullapplication.xls
For earlier statistics on the submitted concept notes in the first stage of the Call for Proposals, please see: http://www.trialog.or.at/docs/statistics_conceptnotes.xls